Page:The Great Didactic of John Amos Comenius (1896).pdf/35

 a fair knowledge of Latin without having any acquaintance with the objects to which the Latin words referred. The professed object of Comenius was to write a book for beginners in Latin, but the bent of his mind was too practical, and his love of the “real” too pronounced, to allow him to work out in detail a class-book that could produce nothing but superficial literary knowledge. With Spencer and the modern Realists he believed that for training of any kind—intellectual, moral, or religious—the study of surrounding phenomena was immensely superior to the study of grammars and lexicons. But grammar could not be ousted from the schools, and the study of the classics, that even now takes the giant’s share of the energy devoted to secondary education, was the only subject to which any serious attention was given. A compromise had therefore to be made, and the elements of Latin became the medium through which an accurate knowledge could be obtained of the world and of the function played by the various objects met with in daily life.

The material with which he started was about 8000 of the most common Latin words, which he arranged so as to form 1000 sentences. At the beginning of the book these were short and simple to suit the stumbling efforts of the beginner, gradually becoming complex and involving more difficult constructions towards the end. Each word was used in its root-signification, and, with the exception of particles like et, sed, quia, etc., only occurred once in the whole work. In the formation of the sentences care was taken to bring out the differences that existed between the vernacular, Czech in the first instance, and Latin, while no grammatical construction of importance was omitted.

The scientific side of the work was accentuated by its division into one hundred sections or chapters, each dealing with some one class of phenomena in nature, art, or society, such as fire, diseases, trade, arithmetic, learned conversation, and angels.